Here comes a bright new year. It offers you 8,756 hours. If you are average, you will sleep 2,920 of them. That leaves you with 5,836 hours in which to build your life and obtain your heart’s desire.

To achieve the optimum, it is essential to exercise efficiency and effectiveness.

Efficiency experts say, “Do the job right.”

Effectiveness experts say, “Do the right job.”

Both are right. Each day offers a person 1,440 minutes. Persons who use these minutes to do the right job right achieve more.

Suppose you were given $1,440 every day and were required to spend it wisely. At the end of each day any unused leftover would be withdrawn from your account.

There would be no carry over at the end of the day.

Would you spend it or waste it?

Relate that to being given 1,440 minutes each day and being required to spend them wisely.

How should you spend them?

Keep in mind three things: Today is all you have, today is all you need, today is all you can handle.

For a happy new year, try a happy new you.

It has been suggested that the greatest discovery of the 20th century was that a person can change his life by changing his mind. That means this new year can give birth to a new you.

Using the same brain you can have a new mind set.

In resolving to “change” your mind be patient with yourself, but don’t be overly tolerant. Scientifically negative thoughts attract certain chemicals to the brain and establish patterns.

Fortunately the opposite is true. Positive thoughts attract endorphins and enkephalins and cause the mind to tend toward the positive. An attitudinal change will eventually result in a chemical change.

There is a process that can help a mental transition. Sir Edmund Hillary, upon climbing Mount Everest, said that climbing at great altitude with rarified atmosphere causes the mind to wander. Therefore, before setting out each day on the climb, it was essential to fix the mind on the object of the day and not let it wander.

To do this, spend the first minutes each morning reading your Scripture and meditating (fixing your mind) on at least one great spiritual truth as your mantra for the day.

Many people discount the spiritual component involved in making a life-style change. Humanistic efforts are made to focus on everything but the spiritual aspect.

Under the guise of separation of church and state faith is discouraged. One of the most extreme accounts involved a person near Philadelphia who had gone through a spiritual new birth asked his pastor to baptize him in a nearby lake. A woman swimming in the lake swam over and said you can’t do that in public; it is a violation of separation of church and state.

Spend some of your early morning daily allotment of 1,440 minutes exploring the faith. Read the Scripture daily. In doing so keep in mind the idea expressed in “Pilgrims Progress” in a conversation between two characters.

One named Matthew was asked, “Do you ever read the Bible?” Upon hearing the answer of yes the question was posed, “What do you do when you come to a passage you don’t understand?”

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